Knox grabs Stone from behind. The one with long pale hair goes for his arm.
Stone hits the blond one in the face.
Knox grunts, struggling with Stone. There are more punches. More grunts.
A deep voice— “Fuck!” Stone fights harder than I’ve ever seen, but he’s outnumbered.
I squeeze more deeply into the corner, horrified. The knife flies into the corner opposite me. More punches, more grunts. Fists and thwaps and swear words fill the room.
Stone’s protecting me. From his brothers.
“Stop it!” I yell. “No more!”
It’s a whisper in the wind.
I make myself small, unused to so much fury and violence. A table crashes over, and I jerk deeper into myself. The most vicious fights I see happen with words and cutting glances. Except that night of my sixteenth birthday. This is like that. Only Stone is the one losing.
Somebody else comes in, shorter, smaller. I can barely see this new one behind the blur of fighting men. Only that the room fills up even more.
Will this one attack Stone, too? How many men can he defend himself against?
A blast rips the air—loud and sudden. Massive as dynamite. Instinctively, I tuck my head into my chest, clapping my hands over my ringing ears.
Something exploded.
No—a gunshot! There’s a shooter!
My blood races. Did somebody shoot Stone?
But no, there he is, lip bloody, crowded on one side of the room with his arms protectively over his guys, as if he can ward off bullets. They’re all together, panting, side by side like they weren’t just fighting a moment ago.
“What the fuck!” Grayson says.
A woman with brown hair and glasses comes into the room. She has fine features like a bird. She’s wearing red yoga pants and a long T-shirt with a bright pink and gray flower design. But the most remarkable thing about her is the shiny gun in her delicate hand.
She gestures at the group of them. “Not a move. Don’t even.”
Who is this girl in this place? Is she one of them? Stone only mentioned brothers in the basement.
“You are in so much trouble,” Grayson growls.
A mischievous glint appears in her eyes, but the way she holds the gun says she isn’t playing.
The guys stay back as she moves toward me.
“Gimme the gun, Abby,” Grayson says. There’s an intimacy to his tone. Are they together? Is this the girl Stone threatened? There are undercurrents in this room strong enough to drag me under, but right now it looks like she’s on my side. Our side?
Stone and I have a side.
“This isn’t your fight, Abby,” Stone growls.
“You okay?” It takes me a while to realize this woman—Abby—is talking to me.
“I’m okay,” I say, but my voice comes out shaky.
She turns back to the guys.
“Not cool,” Grayson growls.
“Oh, I’m sorry, you guys killing each other is cool?” Abby asks. “That’s cool?”
“She knows where the boys are,” Grayson says.
Abby stills. “Oh.” She looks thoughtful. Her chest rises and falls. She turns to me. “You know where the boys are?”
“No! I don’t know where they are!” I say.
Abby frowns at them. “She says she doesn’t.”
“She knows who Keeper is,” Knox says.
Abby turns back to me. “You do?”
“I think so, but the police are handling it,” I say. “I gave them evidence.”
“You should tell them who it is,” Abby says.
I shake my head.
“Is it somebody close to you?” she asks, voice gentle. “Brother? Father?”
I look over at Stone. See the gears turning in his head.
“Vigilante justice is never right,” I plead. “Killing is never right. Let the police handle it.”
Abby groans.
The blond one seems to still, like he’s alerted to some faraway signal. Or maybe there’s an actual sound—I can’t hear anything with the way my ears are ringing. Then Stone turns toward the open doorway.
Somebody’s there.
I gasp in horror.
It’s my father, eyes wild, head tipped back, arm twisted back. He’s being held from behind by somebody bigger and stronger.
“Look who I found skulking around out there,” the man says. His dark hair is shaven to a sheen of black against his scalp.
“Daddy,” I whisper.
“Let her go. It’s me you want,” my father says.
“Don’t hurt him,” I say.
I see when Stone gets it, or maybe he already figured it out thanks to Abby’s question. Father or brother. Someone close enough I’d die to protect him. This is Keeper.
“You have me,” my father says. “You can let her go.”
Stone steps out from the group. “Keeper.” If you didn’t know him, the word might sound casual. But I hear the ice. It’s formed into daggers, that ice. Made for slicing skin apart.
“I’m Keeper.”
A thunderous silence falls over the room. The world takes on hard edges. Fear vibrates in my chest.
Daddy looks over at me. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I turn a pleading gaze to Stone. “Don’t hurt him. You promised.”
“I said I wouldn’t hurt you,” Stone snarls, eyes on my father. “You bring the cops?”
“No,” Dad says.
“He’s alone,” the man who brought him says. “Perimeter is secure. Scanners are clean.”
“How’d you find us?” Stone barks.
Dad nods at my shoulder bag. “Her bag. Chipped.”
It’s not that surprising that they had a tracker put in my bag. I should have expected that. But I thought it would be Detective Rivera who did that. Not Daddy. Not Daddy coming alone.
“Well. We’ve been waiting a long time to meet you,” Stone says. “Years we were down there. But then that’s not a surprise. You knew that.”
“I didn’t know,” Dad says, pale but determined. “Not while it was happening—I swear. I found out later.”
The blond holds out his hands like he wants to hug my dad. The guy holding Dad shoves him at the blond one, who grabs his shirt front with one hand and smashes his fist into Dad’s jaw with the other.
Dad crashes backward into the wall.
I scream.
Grayson is on him, hitting him. The sound sickens me. Knox piles on. Stone hangs back, expression furious. He feels far away.
I look helplessly over at Stone, at Abby. “Do something!”
“I—” She shakes her head, seeming bewildered. She could stop them from hurting each other, but not from this. Not from hurting my father.
“He said he didn’t know! Stone!” I beg tearfully. “He’s my father!”
He sucks in a breath. “Fuck!” He grabs the gun from Abby. He raises it and shoots the cracked ceiling.
The explosion splits my eardrums just like the last one. Drywall falls like snow, settling on everyone’s shoulders. But through the haze of the chaos, the guys pause.
“Enough,” Stone says.
Knox gets right into Stone’s face. It’s like he doesn’t even care about the gun. “It’s Keeper. He needs to die.”
Dad is half lying on the floor, eyes peering at me through his bloody face. He mouths something to me over and over. Words. I’m sorry.
“Please,” I say. “It’s my dad. Please.”
“He says he didn’t know,” Stone says.
“Since when do you give a shit about that?” the buzz-cut guy who brought Dad in demands. “He looked the other way. He admitted he knew eventually, so why didn’t all these fuckers end up in prison? Oh right, because they’re all fucking in bed together. This guy needs to pay.”
“If he wants us to kill him quick, he’ll tell us what we need to know about the boys,” another one says.
Stone steps in front of Dad. “Try it and I’ll cut your fucking t
hroat.” Certainty vibrates in his every word.
The room goes silent. The guys look shocked. Outraged.
Stone’s outnumbered, but he’s the one with the gun. Who would win that fight? I have a feeling no one would. Every single person in this room would lose as soon as one brother killed another.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Knox asks him.
Stone looks at me, his features arranged like a sculpture. Like they’ve always been this visage of fury and determination. Like he never came apart in my body.
But then I see it. Something new. Something different. “Those scumbags treated us like animals,” he says. “But we’re not animals. Fuck that.”
“Like hell we’re not,” Cruz growls.
Stone gives him a hard look. “We’re gonna hear what he has to say, and then we’re gonna think of how we fucking make some justice happen.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Knox says.
“We’ll hear what he has to say,” Stone says again. “And see what we can do together.”
The guys just stare. Violence rolls off their bodies like they’re heat lamps set to a thousand degrees. Suns that landed on Earth.
I have to pass between Grayson and Knox, and I half expect them to reach for me. To rip me apart with their bare hands. They look capable of it.
I make it to my dad, who’s still slumped against the wall.
I take his hand. It feels cool to the touch. God, did they hurt him? Of course they did. But it could be worse.
“Daddy,” I whisper.
“Princess, I’m sorry. So sorry. I never wanted you to know. You or your mother. Never wanted any of this to touch you.”
“Didn’t mind it touching the rest of us,” Grayson drawls, but I squeeze Daddy’s hand, keeping his attention focused on me. Stone’s giving us this window. We have to do what’s right.
“How did you find out?” I ask, bracing myself.
Even though I’m expecting the answer, it still hurts to hear it. “When it burned down. The fire caught onto the house next door. They told me about the accident—that’s what they called it, an accident.”
Someone snorts from behind me. Probably Grayson.
“Dorman—the late governor—he was involved. Just an executive back then. He said they’d pay me for the loss of the houses, but they’d need some time. I said don’t worry about it, I have insurance. But he said no way, no one goes there.”
There’s a hand on the back of my neck, both exerting pressure and providing comfort. I know exactly who it is, even without looking. Know by the sense of rightness that slides through my body.
“What happened next?” Stone asks.
“I was curious.” Dad looks away, and it takes me a second to recognize his expression. I’ve never seen it on his face before. Embarrassment. “I should have been curious sooner. I know that now. But they were important men. Pillars of the community…I never imagined…” He coughs, wipes his mouth. “I drove down myself one night, expecting some kind of gambling ring. Maybe a full-service massage parlor.”
“You weren’t wrong,” Knox mutters, cutting. That blade, it’s sharp on both ends, and I see my father flinch. I see something dark flicker in Stone’s eyes.
“Keep going,” I murmur, helping Daddy sit up a little.
“I thought, the fire must not be that bad if they wanted to keep things running. But the place was abandoned. And really just ruined. The fire had burned through that old structure. It would be a teardown, if anyone ever bothered, but I knew they wouldn’t. As soon as I went downstairs, I knew.”
“How did you know?” Stone asks in this hard voice that doesn’t imply curiosity. It’s the leading kind of question that says he already knows the answers.
My dad’s silent a moment, and I have the feeling he’s far away, seeing it for the first time again. Experiencing it all over again. “My family owned a farm,” he says finally, looking at me. “You know that, right? It was my grandfather who started it, when he came here from Poland.”
“You don’t talk about it much,” I say softly. It’s part of our family history that doesn’t fit into the society pages. That doesn’t fit into my mother’s story about our lives.
“We kept cattle, you know. That was the primary source of income, but my dad, he had a thing for horses. Not the regular kind, for riding or for work. He liked the wild ones. The ones who weren’t quite broken. The ones who hadn’t been trained right.”
“Where is this going?” Grayson demands.
I hold up my hand. “Let him finish.”
And somehow they listen to me.
“But there was this one horse. Domino. That was his name. It was more than bad training. He’d been abused. He had marks all over his hide. He was beyond saving, you know?”
“I hope this isn’t going where I think it is,” Knox mutters.
Abby is the one who steps forward. “Stone asked him a question. He’s answering it.”
“No one could go in the stall,” Daddy said, shaking his head. “I still have this scar on my shoulder from the last time I tried to go in and muck it out. And my father wouldn’t put him down. We ended up just throwing feed over the gate. It was terrible. The smell. I’ll never forget the smell. When you even got close, you could smell what happens when an animal is left to rot. That’s what the basement smelled like. Even over the ashes and cinder, I could smell it. And I knew something horrible had happened there.”
A growl from Stone. “And then you turned yourself in to the police, I’m sure.”
“No,” Daddy says, sounding half repentant, half defiant. “What good would it have done? There wasn’t anyone left in that basement. Everyone dead. Evidence burned. You can’t arrest somebody because of a smell. And Brooke was a baby, her mother still in the hospital from complications. I had to do what was right for the family.”
“And fuck everyone else,” Grayson says, sounding more resigned than angry now.
“I talked to Dorman,” Daddy says with an uneven laugh. Then he winces, those injuries they gave him running deep. “I told him I wouldn’t be part of anything like that again. He told me I was imagining things, that it was a massage business with a little extra. I think he knew I didn’t buy it.”
I shake my head, more heartbroken than I want to admit. Even though I’d suspected Daddy, there was still a part of me that wanted him to be absolved completely. “Then why did he come to my sweet sixteen?”
“Because he was the governor by then,” Daddy says, sounding tired. He closes his eyes, pale.
And because my mother wanted a new wing on the house. “Did Mom know?”
He meets my gaze, mournful. “It would kill her.”
It’s at least some relief to realize one of my parents has their hands clean. “Stone thinks there are boys being held right now. Today. Do you know where they could be?”
“I never did a deal with the governor after that.”
Stone swears behind me. In a perverse way, my father’s attempt to do the right thing has made this harder.
“Any kind of clue can help, Daddy. This is important.”
He looks up at the ceiling with its spider web of cracks, its missing pieces.
Does he feel the angry eyes on him? Does he feel the pent-up rage in the room? I do.
“I never did that, where I kept a house empty for him. But I did construction work for him. Legit work. I made sure to check out every property he dealt with me on, and he knew that I did. Mostly commercial stuff.”
Dad clears his throat. Impatience wells up in the room.
“There was this one project he really wanted me in on,” he continues, “but something didn’t feel right. He had these contracts with businesses who were going to rent storefronts in this old strip mall, but I knew the area was suffering. I’m thinking, who’s paying this much for class C property? So I run some inquiries about the businesses.”
“They’re fronts?” Stone grits out. He’s keeping himself locked tight—for me. It
’s costing him—I can tell. He has a lot of rage that needs to blast out of him.
All the guys do.
“Yes, they exist on paper, but there’s no people. Only this umbrella corporation. An LLC with another LLC on top of them. Layers on layers. I told the governor we were too booked to take the job, even though we were struggling.”
Part of me is proud that Daddy made the right choice, refusing work when it seemed shady. Then again, the right thing to do would have been to turn in the governor years ago, to alert the police to that basement. In Stone’s book that would make him guilty. Just as guilty as the men who hurt him.
Daddy looks at me, his eyes haunted. “The last umbrella I found? Good Shepherd, Inc.”
I suck in a breath, because I know who that is. “Uncle Bill?” I say.
My father nods grimly.
“An uncle?” Stone barks.
“Family friend,” Dad says. “That pregnant woman story was bullshit, but your mother overheard us using those names, and Bill thought it up.”
No wonder he hated Mom repeating it. A perverse and twisted version of the original one.
Stone grunts. “Bottom line, you didn’t cut off contact with all the bad guys.”
A few of the men exchange looks. The air seems to quiver with barely restrained violence. That beating was just the start. But they’re willing to follow Stone.
For now.
“I was pretty sure Bill didn’t know,” my father continues. “I couldn’t imagine he did. And at the time, he was going for the judgeship. I warned him off Dorman, but I didn’t tell him what I suspected. Knowing about the crime, whatever it was, would’ve made him an accomplice after the fact. I didn’t want to do that to him.”
Grayson growls, a dog, ready to attack. “Judge William Fossey?”
Dad nods, his expression grave.
“Uncle Bill,” Stone spits, angry. “He fucking ran that whole operation. Didn’t you know?”
“No,” Dad says.
“God!” Stone’s enraged. He has every right to be. They suffered down there thanks to powerful men giving each other the benefit of the doubt. “He was the puppet master. We never saw him, but he destroyed our fucking lives.”
“I’m sorry,” Dad says, and it sounds like he means it. I also know how little that helps these men who suffered in the basement. This is what they’re fighting. Not only the evil that kidnaps them, that uses them, but the silent danger of men who look the other way.
Need you Now (Top Shelf Romance Book 2) Page 107